Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Lawyer, novelist

Sources

Chesnutt’s Parents. Aside from being a noted attorney, Charles Waddell Chesnutt was America’s first important black writer of fiction. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Andrew J. and Maria Sampson Chesnutt, free people of color from North Carolina. His father joined the Union army during the Civil War, serving as a teamster. After the war he returned to North Carolina and settled with his wife and children. Within a few years Andrew Chesnutt was elected a county commissioner and a justice of the peace.

Education and Experience in North Carolina. Charles Chesnutt enjoyed school, and by the time he was a teenager he was a pupil-teacher. In his travels through North Carolina looking for summer teaching positions, Chesnutt learned firsthand what it meant to be an African American. He was so light-skinned that he could pass for white. He recalled one white man calling to a friend, “Look here, Tom. Here’s a black as white as you are,” when introduced to Chesnutt. He decided not to pass for white, but to work hard enough to be accepted anywhere. In 1877 he was made the assistant principal of a new state normal school for “colored” teachers at Fayetteville, and three years later he became the school’s principal, earning $75 a month. By this time he was married, and in his spare time he studied Greek, Latin, French, and German as well as shorthand. He was also active in the Prohibition movement in North Carolina, working alongside whites to stop the sale of alcohol. At this time Chesnutt read Albion Tourgée’s novel on Reconstruction, A Fool’s Errand (1879). Tourgée, who had been a judge and Freedmen’s Bureau agent, wrote of the racial barriers faced by freed people. Chesnutt admired Tourgée’s ability to describe people and situations realistically; he was ambitious to write fiction and do the same.

Stenography and Law. In 1883 Chesnutt, who now could write two hundred words a minute in shorthand, set out for the North. He worked for the Dow Jones & Company in New York and wrote a Wall Street gossip column for the New York Mail and Express. He then moved to Cleveland, where he found work in the legal department of the Nickel Plate Railroad. His supervisor, former judge Samuel E. Williamson, encouraged Chesnutt to study law. In 1887 Chesnutt received the highest score on the Ohio bar exam. Though he was hardworking and well qualified, no law firms or corporations offered him a position. He continued to work as a stenographer and court reporter while he waited for a legal practice to blossom. His stenography, which he had taken up to feed and house his family while he learned the law, became a business in itself, earning Chesnutt $2,000 to $3,000 each year. Chesnutt also began to write fiction, selling his sketches and short stories to popular magazines. When he sold a story to the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, Chesnutt’s literary career was launched.

Chesnutt and Race. Chesnutt’s stories were set in New York, Cleveland, and North Carolina, and though they cover the range of human experiences, the most popular and enduring ones detail the relationships between people of different races. Racial identity itself I was a problem for Chesnutt; in an 1889 essay, “What is a White Man?,” he examined laws on racial identity. An Ohio statute, for example, declared anyone who was more than half white to be a white person, while a Georgia law maintained that anyone with any Negro blood was black. The state of Mississippi in 1885 declared that anyone with three-quarters white blood (three white grandparents) was white, then in 1890 made it seven-eighths white blood (seven white great-grandparents). In South Carolina the law left the matter up to juries to decide, establishing the criteria by which to determine one’s race: reputation, reception in the white community, and the exercise of white privileges. For Chesnutt the variety of laws showed how ridiculous it was for states to try to separate people of different races. The people of America, Chesnutt wrote, shared many things, and only the fiction of race was allowed to keep them apart. “There can manifestly be no such thing as peaceful and progressive civilization in a nation divided by two warring races, and homogeneity of type, at least in externals, is a necessary condition of harmonious social progress.”

Subsequent Career. In 1899 Chesnutt published The Conjure Woman, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and a biography of Frederick Douglass. He then retired from stenography to write fiction full-time. The House Behind the Cedars (1900) again focused on the impossibility of racial definition. Chesnutt wrote two more novels, but after 1902 he returned to his business of legal stenography because he could no longer support his family by writing fiction. Nevertheless, he continued to be a spokesman for African American rights and corresponded with both Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. His novels did not receive critical acclaim until the 1960s.

Sources

Helen M. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952);

Frances Richardson Keller, An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978).